Alejandro Robaina walks slowly with a gentle shuffle from his bedroom to the porch of his pink stucco house, just outside the western Cuban town of San Luis, to greet visitors. The famous tobacco grower, who will be 90 years old this spring, is still tired from his late morning nap, but the same generous and warm smile in his deeply lined face surfaces from his grogginess. His eyes look a little glazed and dull. His thoughts are more reflective. His words are more deliberate. He is weary after what amounts to nearly a century of life on one of Cuba's greatest tobacco farms.
The scenic Vicales Valley, part of Cuba's Vuelta Abajo, where much fine tobacco is cultivated.
"It's always difficult in the countryside," says Robaina, during a lunch at his plantation in October. "It's going to be difficult for people to plant tobacco this year. They just don't have anything. There is nothing here. They are more likely to plant beans than tobacco."
Two hurricanes last September raised havoc in most of the key agricultural areas of Cuba, although Robaina's wrapper tobacco farm in the Vuelta Abajo was less affected than others. The rich red soil here had dried, and was ready for planting. His three large curing barns were still standing and functional. But tobacco growers in other parts, particularly east of Pinar del RHo in the Semi Vuelta, were much less fortunate. They had little or no provisions and their land and curing barns were in ruin. Their dire predicaments put a question mark over the tobacco crop for this year as well as cigar production in the near future.
But cigar production in Cuba has always had its ups and downs. The political change on the island after Fidel Castro came to power 50 years ago has been seismic, with pervasive sociological and economic upheavals. Yet the way Cuba grows tobacco and produces cigars remains essentially the same with the exception of the nationalization of factories and some farms.
"Growing tobacco has always been a hard life in Cuba," says Jose Orlando Padryn, the patriarch of one of Nicaragua's best cigar manufacturers. Padryn, 82, was born on a tobacco plantation near the town of Pinar del RHo, but left the island in the early 1960s. His relatives still own and work the Vista Hermosa farm there. "It was [a hard life]. It [still] is, and it will [continue to] be hard. Life doesn't change in the countryside."
Most of the farms that grow tobacco for Cuba's cigar industry remain in the hands of families, but the government took over some of the large farms of Padryn's era under two key agricultural reforms beginning in 1959. Venerable locations such as El Corojo, La Esperanza and San Vicente are all government-owned and -managed. The grand houses of rich families are now offices, or divided into apartments for workers. The warehouses that once were full of tobacco are gone or used for other purposes.
"Everything was done in the La Esperanza before the revolution," says Carlos Toraco, who lived on the great finca near San Luis as a boy before emigrating from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s, like so many others. He now makes cigars under his family name in Nicaragua and Honduras. "We did everything with the tobacco from the seedbed to the fermentation to the selecting and to the aging. We sent the tobacco in bales to the factory ready for rolling. We had hundreds of people working for us. We had three or four massive warehouses [to process and age the tobacco]. The tobacco was sent all over the world, especially Tampa. There were so many factories in Tampa. Now there are none."
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Source: Cigar Aficionado
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